[Philosophy of Social Cognition] Thirteenth Meeting

[Martyna Meyer]

Dear all,

I hope you're having a lovely day. It's difficult to believe that the 
end of the semester is already in sight, and we have only a few sessions 
left!

- - - - -
Next week, we will read:

Ratcliffe, M. (2017). *Empathy Without Simulation*. In /Imagination and 
Social Perspective//s/. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315411538
You can access it here 
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333689169_Empathy_Without_Simulation>.

You’re welcome to join our session *online *(Zoom link 
<https://univienna.zoom.us/j/65514918078?pwd=cVZTd2Ivb09uSUFVNTZORWFIOTA4UT09>) 
or*in person*, at NIG (room 3B, third floor).
We’re starting at 6:30 CET. The next meeting is on *Tuesday, June 12, 2023*.
- - - - -

And a few announcements/comments:

- - - - -

1. We would like to invite you to attend a bonus reading group session, 
organised by Andreas.
It's going to take place on Tue, 6.30, a week after the last "standard" 
session. You're sincerely welcome to join!
(I will send out another reminder, just before the bonus session)

Here is a short information from Andreas:

04.07.2023*: Embodied experimental session*
Let's actually embody, experience, and situate social cognition 
(research)! (1) We discuss a *very* short classic paper on rational 
imitation in infants. As a contrast we (2) engage with it through bodily 
exercises and (3) explore how embodied practice may shake up our 
understanding of the concepts presented in the paper. We'll end by 
sketching a conceptual map situating embodied action, personal 
experience, and situated cognition approaches some 
opportunities/challenges they may pose to philosophy of social cognition 
- and let this resonate in our group (I'll provide non-alcoholic summer 
drinks).

Gergely, György, Harold Bekkering, and Ildikó Király. Developmental 
Psychology: Rational Imitation in Preverbal Infants. /Nature/ 415, no. 
6873 (February 2002): 755–755. [https://doi.org/10.1038/415755a free 
access <https://doi.org/10.1038/415755a>]

- - - - -

2. An invitation to the *“Shape Grammars” Reading Group* organised by 
Bailey:

Hello!

I’ve really enjoyed working through these social cognition problems with 
this group this year. Given that you all are experts in cognition, 
really smart, and into doing interdisciplinary work, I wanted to 
cordially invite everyone to my  reading group on “shape grammars” this 
summer. “Shape grammars” is a research paradigm attempting  both to 
answer the question “what kind of cognition is design?,” and to  
formalise the answer to that question vis-à-vis computational 
architecture and design programs. Its formal structure is both inspired 
by, but in key senses opposed to, the Chomskyan “generative” grammars 
paradigm in linguistics. The formal structure in the work of our central 
interlocutor — George Stiny — also owes a lot to work in the pragmatist 
philosophical tradition led by William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, 
and John Dewey.

Most of the authors in “shape grammars” are coming from computer science 
or architecture/engineering, but in a highly theoretical manner owing to 
the atmosphere at the design departments at MIT and UCLA and their close 
proximity to work in linguistics, cognitive science, and analytic 
philosophy. I thus take the reading content to be relevant to anyone in 
each of those fields. Further, I want to read around Chomsky to get some 
of the context, which will have further relevance to people in 
linguistics and cognitive science.

Our central text will be Shape: Thinking About Seeing and Doing (2006) 
by George Stiny. I will send a pdf to all interested parties. Beyond 
that, I aim to prioritise recent papers (last 5 years) in the area. The 
group would begin in July and would meet either weekly throughout the 
summer or as a two week intensive, depending on the results of the 
doodle poll. I’ve found at least one paper that overlaps  shape grammars 
and affordances, and maybe it would make sense to coordinate one joint 
session between those two reading groups.

Please contact me at a12231983 at unet.univie.ac.at if interested. A full 
syllabus is in development, and I will send it to you along with a PDF 
of Stiny’s book and a doodle poll for possible meeting times.

Best

Bailey

- - - - -

3. Comments from Andreas on the last session: (thank you very much, 
Andreas!)

hi guys,

apart from getting drenched (by rain, mostly) I was quite impressed with 
the breadth and depth of our discussion yesterday... and would really 
recommend this 2 page comment by Gotts and Martin ("eminent" 
neuroscientists ;-) on the Seth paper that our paper was mostly 
piggybacking on - I think we at one point actually tried to referred to 
it in a vain quest for clarity). They make some of the same points we 
were exploring plus give a ruthless dissection of predictive coding to boot:

"In his Discussion Paper, Seth makes the case for counterfactual 
richness of predictive processing models in explaining perceptual 
presence and its absence in synesthetic concurrent percepts. Here, we 
question the relevance of counterfactual richness for these and related 
phenomena, and we argue that alternative theories of perception that 
incorporate top-down/bottom-up facilitatory interactions are at no 
relative disadvantage in addressing them"

Gotts, Stephen J., and Alex Martin. “The Nature and Role of Cortical 
Feedback in Perception, Imagery, and Synesthesia.” Cognitive 
Neuroscience 5, no. 2 (April 3, 2014): 121–22. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2014.905518 [open access]

Selected fresh resources on autism and atypical social attention traits 
such as trouble maintaining eye contact: while there is something there 
from experience interacting with persons diagnosed as ASD, (1) its 
complicated ;-), -> i.e. some Aspies will tell you they don't like eye 
contact not because it doesn't do anything for them but because it is 
actually too emotionally taxing, and (2) we have quite a hard time 
establishing clear lab results for systematically different social 
attention styles:

Falck-Ytter, Terje, Johan Lundin Kleberg, Ana Maria Portugal, and Emilia 
Thorup. “Social Attention: Developmental Foundations and Relevance for 
Autism Spectrum Disorder.” Biological Psychiatry, October 20, 2022. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2022.09.035 [open access].
[succinct summary of a wide range of at best "mixed findings", I've 
known and worked with 3 of those authors ;-)]

López, Beatriz, Nicola Jean Gregory, and Megan Freeth. “Social Attention 
Patterns of Autistic and Non-Autistic Adults When Viewing Real versus 
Reel People.” Autism, March 30, 2023, 13623613231162156. 
https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231162156 [open access].
[this is a fun validation showing that at most (some) autistics (may) 
watch TV differently but have similar gaze strategies for real people 
(here that's even true for the same TV clips that they were merely told 
is a live feed ;-). After all, "neurotypicals" don't walk around 
constantly making eye contact, would be quite rude in our culture...]

cheers,
a

- - - - -

Have a great rest of the week and I'm looking forward to seeing you on 
Tuesday!

Best,
Martyna
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